The morning of Mrs. Plant’s wedding, someone dragged some of us out to form a minyan. One of the guys was wearing a baseball cap. A woman was saying Kaddish. It made me feel very useful.
But I digress from the OP. 
In the Jewish religion, you do various commandments that were given by God. These commandments can be divided into three groups:
[ul]
[li]Rational commandments that are necessary for any civilization to function (Don’t murder, don’t steal, etc.)[/li]
[li]Commemorative commandments such as eating maztah on Passover to remember the Jews eating maztah when they left Egypt because they left Egypt so quickly that they didn’t have time to let the bread rise.[/li]
[li]Commandments you do because God said so. These include keeping kosher and the prohibition of wearing wool with linen. These commandments have no logical purpose and no obvious reason. God said to do it, so we do.[/li][/ul]
It is this last category that is much of what Kabbalah is attempting to explain.
The Hasidim didn’t invent anything new. Kabbalah is a fairly old work that predates the Chasidic movement. However, excessive study of the Kabbalah was frowned upon because of the fear that you get so caught up in the mystical side of Judaism, you’ll forget the actual religion itself. It’s like all the actors and actresses who study Kabbalah and buy Jewish holy water or wear specially blessed red bracelets on their wrists, but don’t follow such basic Jewish laws like keeping kosher or observing the Shabbat.
The Chasidic movement concentrated on this mystical aspect. Why the commandments? Why are there 613 commandments? What happens if you don’t do the commandments? However, there was no magic involved. You still had to follow the commandments. There was no secret passage or incantation that would grant you great wealth and allow you to amass power without doing the grunt work.
The difference between Hasidic Jews and non-Hassidic Jews is one of emphasis and not of substance. It’s like the difference between Physical Chemistry college degree and Chemical Physics college degree.
Yom Kippur is not an annual day for atoning for sins. You can do that any time. A better way to look at Yom Kippur is like your annual review at work. You look back at the year, and decide where you fell short on your performance and where you can improve.
I just want to make this clear because many Christian Missionaries use this line as a means to convert Jews. “If you die before Yom Kippur, you’ll have sins you haven’t atoned for and go directly to Hell! Is that what you want? Let me give you a few pamphlets…”
I also want to point out that the concept of Original Sin doesn’t exist in Jewish doctrine. Jews don’t believe we aren’t born in sin and cannot atone for our sins because we have no way to communicate directly with God.
Well, there is that thing about G-d closes the book on Yom Kippur on who lives and who dies.
At one time, being Jewish was something Universities did check. In Harvard, Jews weren’t allowed to be more than a few percent of the students. The idea is that if X% of the population is Jewish, then Jews shouldn’t make up X% of the student body. This logic of course, didn’t apply to Blacks of Hispanics. Other colleges didn’t accept Jews because these institutions thought of themselves as Western (and Christian) institutions and didn’t want it to be polluted by Jewish oriental thinking.
One of the reasons for asking for your mother’s maiden name is that you could change your last name from Goldburg to Smith, but your mother would still be the former Miss Kravitz.
The best way to create a cultural group is to treat a random group of people as distinct and let them know they’re not exactly welcomed. The Jews have been subjected to this as a group for over two millennium.
One of the things that can happen during an annual review is whether the Big Boss decides whether or not you get to hang around for another year or whether He feels it is time to terminate your employment :).
This isn’t really true, though. They ask your race… if you identify yourself as a native american, that’s certainly defining some parts of your cultural background, no? As you point out, hispanic/latin american is also asked, and that has cultural overtones to it. Does it hold 100%? Of course not. But if being Jewish is defined as more of a culture than a religion, then I think it’s a fair question.
Unless, of course, identifying yourself as a jew IS defining your religion, which from this thread is certainly not not seem to be the case.
Yeah, but you can get another job.
Yes, judaism is a religion. But the word “religion” (at least to me) means some belief system which includes one or more Gods, supreme beings, or whatever. Atheism is not a “religion”. It’s a belief that no god exists, therefore identifying yourself as an atheist does not imply any religious underpinnings.
It seems that the jews who have given their viewpoints in this thread (and other threads on this board, which is where my curiosity was stirred in the first place), do NOT necessarily define their “jewishness” (sorry, can’t think of a better word) by any religious beliefs. Rather, many see themselves as cultural jews.
I personally agree with you that “culture” and “ethnicity” are being used interchangeably with respect to this topic, and I don’t think they are interchangeable either. But since I’m not a jew (as far as I know), I’m not sure I can define it for folks that are jewish.
I’m curious as to what you mean by causing “hysteria”?
There’s no reason it can’t be. However, for the most part Universities don’t consider it an important characteristic. You’d have to ask them why, but I would guess that it is because Jews have never been considered an underrepresented minority in higher education.
Also, “cultural Jews” do not all share the same culture.
President Abbott Lawrence Lowell (the perfect WASP name) of Harvard said once that “the summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” That was before he set the quota for Jews at Harvard in 1922 at 15%. Quotas meant at that time that Jews were limited to 15% of the student body, not that they had to be brought up to 15% of the student body. That’s not dissimilar to the way Asians are considered at, say, the University of California system, where they make up a far larger percentage of the student body than they do of the California population.
As the quote indicates, the prejudice against Jews was as much class and “culture” as it was religion. They were not “our kind.” They strived, they openly liked money, they had no history and ancestry and associations, they didn’t go to the same hotels and camps and boarding schools and country clubs and débutante balls. They got into Harvard on the basis of their own merit rather than because their parents and grandparents had gone there.
Today’s prejudices are somewhat different. Asians are a racial category. So are Native Americans, to answer another of Stink Pot Fish’s questions. (The categories in 2000 were “American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; and White.”) Yet Asian comprises a huge number of ethnicities, some of them long-term mortal enemies, who were no doubt gobsmacked to find out they were considered identical in America. Hispanics are an official ethnicity. (“There are also two minimum categories for ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics and Latinos may be of any race.”) But Hispanics comprise an extraordinary number of cultures and don’t appreciate being considered as a single body.)
There is a type of Eastern-European derived New York City-centric culture that a number of Jewish immigrants and descendants shared that I call Yiddish culture. It’s Yiddish culture that most people think of when they think of Jewish culture. But Yiddish culture is as non-representative of Jews as a whole as the labels Asian or Hispanic are of those who fall under them. Yiddish culture as a whole is dying. Far more younger Jews today speak Hebrew than speak Yiddish and they identify, as far as they identify with any non-American influence, with Israel and independence rather than Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Israel itself is a melting pot of Jewish cultures from all over the world and the various Sephardic and Arabic and other Jewish traditions that its immigrants call upon don’t resemble American Yiddish culture in any way, leading to continuing internal struggles.
So what happens if a dying culture that is not representative of Jews in general and young Jews in particular and of many immigrant Jews not at all is used as a cultural marker for admission into college? Jewish groups would protest. Non-Jewish groups would protest. Anti-Semites of all stripes who care not a whit for any of these subtleties would protest. Loudly. I think hysteria is a fair word for the brouhaha that would ensue.
Judaism at least has a yes/no answer as a religion. Degree of belief doesn’t matter a whole lot. I know atheists who started out in many religions. If they want to continue to identify with their childhood church they can and will and as long as thoughts aren’t measurable and quantifiable that’s as legitimate as any other answer.
But culture is mythical thing with claws and teeth, defined differently by everybody. It will bite back if you try to squeeze it into a yes/no box. As you can see here with responses by people who couldn’t identify a single aspect of Jewish culture that is distinguishable from the Jewish religion but will loudly state that it is a fact nonetheless.
As a social scientist that makes me want to weep. Physicists get to pull out equations and squash people whose knowledge of math is this lacking but when we poor social scientists see ignorance of equal proportions we get shouted down by the mob who know it when they see it. Culture is as counterintuitive as quantum mechanics but I don’t have the equations to prove it. And when it comes to religion and culture you can’t even take me on faith.
I knew a lot in my town. They are smart, funny, and mostly OK, like any people.
I think they do believe in one god, but not the previous messiah.
But I do not know more such as differences between groups or specifics.
My dad is a musician, and has occasionally been encouraged to wear a (provided) yarmulke when playing at weddings and other functions put on by Jewish families or organizations. Although he’s Catholic, he wears the yarmulke – he figures if people are paying for his services, it’s as much their right to ask him to don a certain head covering as it is to request he wear a coat and tie, a T-shirt and jeans, or whatever. If he’d be required to wear something that would make him unbearably uncomfortable, whether physically or morally, he just wouldn’t take the job in the first place.